We’ll see, though it’s doubtful the lobbyists she works for will stand for this kind of pressure by some opinionated online business named Emily’s List. The checks have probably already been deposited into Sinema’s war chest. At the same time, this is a good move. You go, Emily!
Bullies, because they have never felt safe, loved, or cherished, grow up supremely defensive, perpetually hurt, ashamed of their weakness and inconsolably angry. They were emotionally neglected, humiliated for ordinary human needs, bullied by someone they depended on when they were very young. These tiny victims grow up to see life through the eyes of a hurt child, a zero-sum game pitting the strong against the weak, a contest fated to end only in dominance or submission.
To berate and dismiss, or otherwise beat you, is to dominate you. To sincerely apologize to you when I see I have hurt you is to bend the knee in humiliated weakness. Bullies see a simplified black and white world, a series of grim transactions to be fought to victory or defeat. Victory feels fleetingly great, the agony of defeat is well-known and terrible to behold, particularly in a bully.
This inconsolable rage in the heart starts in the bully’s earliest life, continues year after year, making the young person harden himself against pain until finally he succumbs to sadism. The ability to dominate and bully people is not without its rewards in the world of business and politics, but it is a shit thing just the same. When a bully in control of others creates a culture of bullying, where only brutality in service to the bully is rewarded, it is a shit thing and often a deadly thing.
I just finished listening to the fascinating The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. Though the book, in its first edition, was published in 1978, it ends with a seemingly prescient insight, though it addresses a perpetual human failing — the falling into angry mobs because the unbearable anguish of your life compels you to take out your rage on strangers, in the name of a belief system. Here is the very end of Alice Miller’s popular book:
A person who can honestly, and without self-deception, deal with his feelings has no need to disguise them with the help of ideologies. The basic similarity of the various nationalistic movements flourishing today reveals that their motives have nothing to do with the real interests of the people who are fighting and hating, but instead have very much to do with those people’s childhood histories.
The mistreatment, humiliation and exploitation of children is the same worldwide as is the means of avoiding the memory of it. Individuals who do not want to know their own truth collude in denial with society as a whole, looking for a common enemy on whom to act out their repressed rage. But as the inhabitants of this shrinking planet near the end of the twentieth century the danger inherent in self-deception is growing exponentially, and we can afford it less than ever. Fortunately, at the same time, we now have the tools we need to truly understand ourselves as we were and as we are.
For most bullies, the path away from sadism is too painful. What they have suffered as vulnerable children is too painful to seek insight into. They feel in control only when dominating others, as they were brutally dominated.
We learn, to nobody’s surprise, that as children Donald Trump and Charles Koch (born 1946 and 1935 respectively), both had driven, largely absent fathers who were brutal, intolerant and demanding, people who might fairly be called unloving pieces of shit. They were raised to believe that only the ruthless pursuit of money and power made them worthy of love (which it is unlikely either of them ever found in later life.)
Fred Koch was an admirer of the Nazis, he was introduced to Hitler before the war and Koch Industries built the oil refineries that the Luftwaffe would need for their high octane fuel to lead Hitler’s blitzkreig. Fred Trump was arrested as a young man at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens. Fred Koch was one of the founders of the John Birch Society, the lunatic fascist fringe of the far-right in the years after Brown v. Board of Education made public school segregation illegal in the U.S., the Birchers responded by calling for the Chief Justice’s impeachment. Fred Trump took millions in tax subsidies to build post-war working class housing, passed most of it on to his children tax-free through various frauds (read the New York Times investigative story about Frederick Christ Trump’s elaborate tax fraud and tax evasion schemes, a factual article never challenged in court [1]) and kept his housing developments racially segregated (no Puerto Ricans either, thank you) until the Fair Housing Act and the federal court forced him to stop discriminating. Characteristically, Fred Trump, and his second choice protegée. Donald [2], admitted no wrongdoing and claimed victory in the case, although “minorities” were now able to rent Trump apartments.
Charles was the second oldest of four Koch brothers (he and David beat the other two in a bitter, decades-long court battle for the right to Koch Industries), Donald was the third of four Trump children. Fred Koch believed his sons should fight it out, to see who was fit to be the boss. When they were toddlers Fred Koch, who was rarely at home, hired a strict German nanny to make sure the boys all used the toilet at the same time every day, and she raised young Charles, his older brother Fred Jr. and the babies, until the Nazis took France and she returned to the homeland to celebrate with the Fuhrer. Fred Trump openly favored his older, brighter son, a golden boy named Fred Jr., beloved of everybody. Young Donald didn’t know what to do with himself until he got a little brother to bully. It beat the hell out of his life before he had a weak baby brother to practice sadism on.
Bullies see the world as a desperate fight not to be injured and their main weapon is attack. They find people weaker than themselves to prey on, if someone shows fear, they attack. The way not to be bullied is to stand up to a bully, though few of us consistently have this ability. In the case of Donald Trump, any time he has been forcefully opposed he has backed down. We saw this at several key moments during his time in office, even at the very end, while vehemently denying his electoral loss, when he backed down from replacing the Attorney General with a man who would lie to confirm Trump’s lie about a stolen election, after a three hour shouting match, in the face of a unified threat from leaders of the Department of Justice and his loyal White House Counsel.
The bully as an individual is one thing, and sickening enough. The bully as a mob, a thousand, or a million strong, gathered to take out their limitless hurt and rage on those who can’t defend themselves, an ongoing tragedy of human history. Insight might be extremely painful for a bully to attain, but it is probably less painful than being tortured, with your neck in a noose, at the mercy of your fellow enraged bullies.
[1]
In spite of this threat, a brilliant example of the fiercest legal puffery money can buy, inserted in a very droll matter by the Grey Lady, between two paragraphs detailing the fraud with great specificity:
[2]
Freddie, Fred Trump Jr., (Mary Trump’s father) had disappointed his father with a lack of ruthlessness, demonstrated dramatically when he replaced drafty windows in freezing Trump apartments in a complex he was managing without forcing the tenants to take their powerful landlord to court. It cost Frederick Christ Trump millions to replace the windows, (for no reason!} and was the decisive blow against his chosen son, Fred Jr. as his successor.
Fred Sr. realized he’d have to train the vain little juvenile delinquent to run the Trump empire, once the kid proved that, even though he had little business smarts, he was a ruthless killer who’d do whatever was necessary to increase the family fortune. Fred Jr. ended his days drinking himself to death as a custodian in one of the Trump buildings. His family would be cheated by the other Trumps when the patriarch finally died, naturally. Donald would finally be able to defy his father by selling off all his properties, in express violation of his stated wishes. He sold his father’s real estate empire for well under its appraised value, naturally.
All my years as a lawyer still do not allow me to understand how a person’s willfully delusional belief can insulate him from having the clear intent that his actions continually demonstrated. First, a bit of context from today’s Washington Post.
Jennifer Rubin, in an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, chose Merrick Garland as the “distinguished pol of the week” for his long-belated speech about following the facts and the law and prosecuting everyone involved in the insurrection that culminated in the riot at the Capitol on January 6th. Rubin, a lawyer by training and, in my opinion, an astute political analyst, was encouraged by Garland’s newly announced determination to follow the facts and the law and hold everyone accountable for the insurrectionist riot (we can now officially call it that, after DOJ charged a bunch of militia leaders with seditious conspiracy), whether they stormed the Capitol on January 6 or not. Her op ed was written to encourage us to be encouraged too. If you believe Garland’s resolve, and trust his ability to get investigations and prosecutions done, and irreversible convictions, before the short window of two party democracy closes, you should be encouraged.
A top headline on the front page of the same Washington Post reads: Justice Dept’s January 6 conspiracy probe doesn’t seem to directly pursue Trump. The article details the lack of DOJ investigation into Trump, his inner circle at the very end, including anyone who was in the Willard Hotel Command Center on January 6. Pleader of the Fifth Amendment John Eastman, author of the legal memo on how Pence could brazen it out on January 6th, using a crackpot 12th Amendment legal theory, to keep the Biden election result in doubt and throw the election to the Republican (for purposes of an electoral tie only) House, was never contacted by DOJ. Neither was disgraced former NYC police commissioner and convicted felon Bernard Kerik (imprisoned in the same new jail complex that until his conviction bore his name — pardoned by Trumpie) who told the Post he had “no DOJ contact”. Neither was Rudy, Sloppy Steve, American Eichmann Jeffery Clark, Mark Meadows. Mike “Good guy” Flynn or anyone else involved in the Trump dead-enders’ hydra-headed plan to overturn a US presidential election based on repeated allegations of massive voter fraud by Black urban voters.
We read that the DOJ has not contacted Brad Raffensberger, whose recorded call with Trump. released publicly more than a year ago, has the desperate former president ticking off every offense and sub-offense in the Georgia criminal law about attempting to corruptly influence an election outcome. Between the lines we find ourselves reading “what the fucking fuck?”
Perhaps most concerning is this fucking trope, which recurs in the article and, as I wrote up top, I have no idea how to understand, even after three years in law school and practicing law for a decade.
How is this different than Alan Dershowitz’s demented argument at one of Trumpie’s impeachments that if the president sincerely believed he was acting in the best interests of the nation, even if he was incorrect in his belief, as when he asked the new Ukrainian president to announce a fake fraud investigation to smear his political opponent (on the grounds that it was best for his country that he alone be left in place to fix it) that he could not have committed a misdemeanor, let alone a high crime? It is a close variation on the classic Nuremberg defense: if the Fuhrer commanded me to do it, and his word is law, and I was bound by an oath to obey, how was I to know he was an insane, mass murdering maniac ordering me to commit massive war crimes, let alone crimes against humanity, when I merely did what I to this day believe was my lawful duty?
Intent can be established by showing a pattern of behavior that demonstrates it. Trump intended to stay in office, no matter what. His intent was clear and every act he undertook, before and after the 2020 election, was in furtherance of what he intended to do. He continued to do these things after being shown he was mistaken in his belief that the election had been stolen by bipartisan fraud. He fired and replaced any official who served at his pleasure who told him the truth about the election he still refuses to concede he lost.
He was told, unequivocally, by his loyal gunsel Bill Barr, by Barr’s successor who refused to participate in a plan to enlist the DOJ in the fraudulent claim of voter fraud, by Pat Cippolone, his White House Counsel, by HSA cyber specialist Chris Krebs [1], by Raffensberger, by many others loyal to him, that there had been no evidence of massive, or even appreciable, voter fraud found. This was confirmed by numerous recounts and “audits” in every swing state Trump lost. It was reaffirmed when every lawsuit brought to challenge the election results was thrown out of court for failure to make a legal case.
Are we to believe that if Trump argues that he genuinely believed these people all lied to him, that the recounts and audits were all wrong, that the courts acted out of mere spite and irrational hatred of him, and that his lie was actually the truth, that he lacked the intent, and the premeditation, to commit the crimes he seems to have committed (hard to explain events otherwise, unless you get all of your information only from FOX, OANN, Newmax or Breitbart)? Seems to me the claim might be useful as part of an insanity defense, but how does it show a hard to overcome lack of intent on Trumpie’s part?
Hard to keep the top of my skull from blowing off my head, sometimes. We are living in times so interesting they make the old Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” really pop.
[1]
Trump fired Krebs, Trump’s Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States Department of Homeland Security, immediately after Krebs publicly stated that the 2020 election had been the most secure election on record. Evidence of the Orange Polyp’s Intent? Nah…
When Scalia and four other right-wing “originalist” justices ruled that the Second Amendment, which begins “[a] well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state” conferred a virtually illimitable individual right to keep and walk around with firearms, whether individuals were members of the well-regulated militias to protect against slave revolts that the amendment was designed for or not, the NRA and gun manufacturer lobbyists rejoiced. The Supreme Court had spoken, it would be virtually impossible to impose federal limitations on gun sales, gun ownership, gun carrying, gun use. No matter how regular American mass shootings became, no matter that 90% of the population, after the infamous slaughter of kindergarteners by a crazed heavily armed man who had first murdered his mother, favored nationwide restrictions on gun ownership, at the very least background checks, in our exceptional democracy.
States and localities, of course, can regulate guns, subject to court challenges by NRA lobbyists and gun manufacturers. Several states require no training or licensing, get as many guns as you want, carry them openly wherever you want, it’s your undeniable freedom under Scalia’s learned interpretation of the Second Amendment. The District of Columbia, not a state (though more populous than Vermont or Wyoming), has fairly strict restrictions on guns. As a result, the rioters who planned for bloodshed at the Capitol on January 6th mostly left their guns in cars, trucks, stockpiled across the river in Virginia (as the recent seditious conspiracy indictments inform us).
Imagine if that angry army of tourists had been able to freely exercise their sacred Second Amendment right on January 6th. There would have been a shoot out. It would have been a mass casualty event, as planned by the most extreme members of that crowd, who, we now know from their own words, called for a blood bath. That policeman screaming in agony and fear as the MAGA rioters crushed him in a doorway? Shot in the face, “made that fucking noise stop, bro” and a thousand instant thumbs ups.
It’s fair to say, and chilling to consider, that but for D.C.’s strict gun laws, we’d all be currently living in an American version of the Third Reich.
I can speak only for myself, an opinionated person writing here daily under the First Amendment, able to freely refer to the “transactional” leader of the GOP as the Orange Polyp and the obstructionist vanity senators blocking democracy as piles of shit, but after a bloodbath at the Capitol, and the extra-constitutional installation of a lawless, malignant polyp as permanent president, I’d probably already be in a concentration camp.
Hyperbole? Perhaps, but only because of my very small audience here on the internet. I wouldn’t be important enough to round up in the early rounds of violent revenge against those critical of a leader so perfect he is lovingly embraced by thousands of White Christian leaders across the Bible Belt and beyond. Leaders who understand that Jesus Christ Himself wanted the least of them to have guns, as many and as powerful as they like, to kill heretics, traitors and child molesters everywhere.
These guys make very powerful political ads. I don’t like their politics, these now somewhat repentant Republican political operatives. They and their fellow far-right “movement conservative” ilk delivered our democracy directly to this extreme crisis point. I like their political views, their worldview, about as much as I like the idea of President Liz Cheney carrying on her evil father’s dynasty. But I have to take my hat off to their particular talent, these hardcore Republican media and marketing campaign specialists sure know how to make an ad that punches their enemy in the face, hard. This might be their best punch yet.
Lawrence O’Donnell with a brilliant analysis of the latest stand by the empty vessel of vain ambition from Arizona. O’Donnell was as angry as I was hearing Sinema’s insulting and incoherent little speech about the inviolability of the filibuster and the lamentble death of two voting rights laws she deeply believes in, but he knew, from being a Senate staffer, that somebody wrote those words for her to speak. Making the words even more despicable, somehow.
O’Donnell then played back her spirited, spontaneous remarks from when she was in the House, mocking Joe Leiberman (before he actually joined the GOP) as a Democrat in name only and describing how the rest of the Democrats just have to vote around an obnoxious, not-with- the-team creature like that.
Friends of democracy, I give you the vain, vile, contrarian gentlewoman from Arizona, the Honorable Kyrsten “dagger to democracy’s throat” Sinema, and an excellent editorial by Lawrence O’Donnell.
Nothing to see here, really, but the $50,000,000 ad buy (paid for by donors to Trump’s “Legal Defense Fund”) promoting the false claim of a stolen election, likely paid mostly to Facebook, stopped on January 5th, the day before the peaceful MAGA protest at the Capitol that injured 140 police officers. Immediately after the election Facebook removed the pre-election safeguards against amplified, dangerous misinformation and hate speech because of a drop in its profits caused by these voluntary safeguards. Like other patriotic American billionaires, who had a windfall of literally trillions of dollars during the pandemic and upheaval of Trumpism, the head of Facebook had his bottom line priorities straight during months of propaganda-stoked rage and chaos that led up to the riot at the Capitol.
This reversion to Facebook’s normal business model to maximize emotional engagement and clicks allowed an infuriating lie to spread, like yer proverbial wild fire, to millions on-line and fuel rage against an imagined devilish conspiracy, involving evil Democrats, traitorous RINOs and other nefarious actors, including George Soros, George Clooney, George Burns, George Carlin, dead leftist dictators, corrupt voting machine makers and Italian hackers, to deprive the ordained leader, chosen by Christ Himself, of the presidency, after mathematically impossible masses of cheating brown people and various enemies, many of them dead, fraudulently voted for the sleepy Chinese puppet.
Representative Eric Swallwell explains in less than a minute (almost a year ago)
But, seriously, what is my point in even pointing any of this out? If Attorney General Merrick Garland doesn’t seem to feel any great urgency to investigate and prosecute conspirators who left a massive trove of public evidence of their detailed crimes against democracy, who am I to opine? Perhaps another superman, a non-authoritarian one, will rescue us from this gathering, hydra-headed catastrophe…
If this many of his base had attended his inauguration, Trumpie wouldn’t have had to make Sean Spicer lie to reporters/everyone about the enormous size of his manly crowd:
Here’s the stirring two minute American carnage porn video the crowd was shown, narrated by Trump, scored with heroic rap music, since gangbangers like Kanye love the gold-plated Boss, right before the great man himself took the stage to exhort the crowd, resulting in thousands of energized patriots surging down to the Capitol to fight like hell to Stop the Steal, kick police ass and take names, give courage to, or kill, hesitant Republican elected officials like the cowardly Vice President.
Bearing in mind that provable facts no longer matter to the Trump 39%, here’s fascism historian Jason Stanley on the echoes of Nazi propaganda on January 6th, right before the “violent terrorist attack” that Lyin’ Ted apologized for calling the peaceful protest to save democracy. Stanley’s powerful, informative essay putting the two minute call to arms in chilling historical context is called “Movie at the Ellipse a Study in Fascist Propaganda”. It sure enough was.
Fuck if I know.
The only insight I have, and this took me years to really take in, is not to make depression more bitter by blaming yourself for feeling hopeless. This is the trap of depression — you feel depressed because you believe you don’t have what it takes, you lack the qualities that everyone else has, you are a loser, too weak to do what everyone else manages to do. That is the fucking depression talking, trust me. If you feel depressed, it is burden enough without adding unforgiveness toward yourself. It is also useful to remember that depression almost always passes, nuance, taste and color return.
As for good reasons for depression, there are currently many. At the top of the list is the accelerating pandemic, a wildly proliferating virus much cannier and more adaptable than the puny earthlings fighting over how to fight it, as the planet plummets toward ecosystem apocalypse. From the demented, “transactional” former president’s point of view, and millions in his cult, the more Americans who die of Covid-19 under Biden the better. It will prove that Biden is a loser, working with the Chinese Communist Party and Burisma Energy to kill as many white Christian Americans as possible and let George Soros replace them with brown fake Americans dumb enough to vote for elite pedophile cannibals. Luckily for Trump, he’s got a 6-3 Supreme Court majority poised to make it much harder for the Biden administration to fight this relentlessly morphing, deadly worldwide disease. US Covid death numbers are climbing every day, as a burned out health care force, on the front lines now for more than two years, in a war with no seeming end, starts to call in sick and quit. Talk about fucking depressing.
Any chance of justice after a president who lost reelection by a large margin repeatedly lies about a stolen “landslide victory” then unsuccessfully twists the arms of election officials to change results, then tries to get the DOJ to announce fake fraud investigations while his henchmen in Congress do the rest, then executes the elaborate, extra-constitutional “Green Bay Sweep” to sweep aside certified, recounted election results, based on what Ted Cruz yelled were “unprecedented allegations of massive electoral fraud,” before he unleashes a whipped up crowd, and everything else the defeated never-say-die motherfucker does daily? The Attorney General announced finally that the DOJ is very seriously considering doing something to restore faith in American justice, as long as the DOJ can convince people that it has no political agenda, in a society where even basic safety precautions during an unprecedented modern pandemic are weaponized for partisan advantage (by only one party, boys and girls).
Even Mike Pence, a Trump loyalist who embarrassed actual obsequious miniature poodles with his stone-faced ass-licking of his master, realized the game was over prior to the “Green Bay Sweep” on January 6. He consulted far-right former federal judge/Republican operative J. Michael Luttig about John Eastman’s absurd interpretation of the Twelfth Amendment which supposedly gives the sitting Vice President the right to overturn the results of any election that does not keep him in office. Even Luttig, a man who defended as proper Bill Barr’s meddling to get insane Trump fanatic Michael Flynn’s guilty pleas for perjury thrown out, told Pence not to do it. So did former VP Dan Quayle, in no uncertain terms.
Here’s the kicker: after Pence broke the bad news to Trump, that he could not hold up the certification of Biden electors, based on a lie — no matter how big — and a crackpot legal theory, Trump was furious. To Pence’s reported horror and anger, on the evening of January 5th Trump released a press statement announcing that Pence was fully on board with the plan to force another fraud investigation before Biden could be certified as the duly elected president.
Think about just the Pence angle of this hundred ring shit show MAGA seditious conspiracy circus. A crass yet obsequious far-right Christian crusader who had taxpayers fund Gay Conversion Therapy in Indiana (fuck the teen suicides, Jesus said to cure ’em!), an unlikable, charisma-free smudge of Santorum put in office by the connivance and funding of Charles Koch and company (like equally disgusting, suddenly invisible Mike Pompeo, who started as the Kochs’ personal Congressman from Topeka), Pence deserves whatever fate karma might have in store for his type. Still, when he decided to do the right thing, to follow the law, Trump set him up as a traitor by publishing a lie that made him seem like a suddenly vacillating liar too weak to do what he’d promised. That’s why the mob wanted to hang him as a cowardly traitor, because he’d chickened out at the last second, because he didn’t save America from the illegitimate brown and yellow hoards. When Trump sent a motorcade to evacuate Pence from the besieged Capitol, Pence declined to get in, fearing, not unreasonably, that his boss had taken out a hit on him. What the fuck?
We learn that the Fulton County DA spoke to Trump’s lawyers last month, and Trump reacted in fury that was then hard to understand, since nobody knew about the meeting with Trump lawyers, outside of the DA, the lawyers and Trump. The only sticking point in prosecuting Trump for that well-known attempt to cajole, persuade, threaten and otherwise get Georgia officials to “find 11,780 Trump votes”, we are cautioned, is the question of Trump’s intent.
What if Trump actually believed he’d really been cheated? What if he sincerely didn’t believe Barr, Chris Krebs and everybody else he appointed, and who were soon out of his government shortly after telling Trump there’d been virtually no voter fraud in 2020? I went to law school and practiced law, and I still don’t understand this lack of intent business, unless it goes to an insanity defense for the former president.
So, yeah, there are countless reasons to feel as depressed as I did opening my eyes this morning. Unless your depression is so severe that you feel life is not worth living (in which case, exert yourself to seek help) my best suggestion is get out of bed, use the bathroom, brush your teeth, take a shower, get yourself walking. Much of soldiering through depressing times is just getting yourself walking, and connecting with others, however you can, no matter how how horrific the prospect of being in contact with others may seem. It is very easy to feel alone in this, and very important to stay connected, as best you can. My two copeks on how to endure any perfectly reasonable depression you are feeling right now in these exceptionally depressing times.
Hard-hitting 44 second video From the Republican Accountability Project, a group of Republicans for democracy. Several will no doubt work for for the Liz Cheney for President campaign in 2024. Their message couldn’t be clearer for 2022. Or more welcome.
Strong Medicine for a deadly, highly contagious disease, American fascism.
This ad is apparently eleven months old, (it has less than 70,000 views on youTube). They are currently running it as an ad on FOX, during Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Fox and Friends. Good luck convincing the Trump death cult that these are not all fake clips manipulated by vicious commies, but, more power to the Republican Accountability Project. More timely now than when they created it right after the riot at the Capitol.
“You fucking did this!” is what Liz Cheney snarled at Jim Jordan, pushing him away as he tried to take her arm as they fled from MAGA rioters sacking the Capitol.
gratuitousblahg 